A Communitarian Defense of Liberalism: Emile Durkheim and Contemporary Social Theory. (book reviews)

The theoretical strategy of this book is quite straightforward. Mark Cladis sees both sets of protagonists in the liberal-communitarian debate as addressing valuable and ineliminable aspects of our social situation, and he hopes to delimit a broader theoretical standpoint capable of encompassing what both sides in the debate have to offer.

Cladis proposes Emile Durkheim as the exemplar of this more encompassing synthetic position, surpassing what Amy Gutmann calls "the tyranny of dualisms" (p. 2). What results is a highly eclectic and fairly agreeable survey of the ...

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